Here We Are Alone Together.

I've been thinking lately about how design shapes our experience of beauty—how the things we build quietly train us in what feels "normal," what feels satisfying, what feels worth wanting.

When my son was 14, he wrote his first worship song. The opening line was simple and haunting:

Here we are alone together.

Those words have been rolling around in my head for two years. Because it's not just a lyric. It's a diagnosis.

One of the most significant things the iPod (and then the iPhone) did wasn't merely to improve sound quality or make songs portable. It redesigned the social meaning of music. Before earbuds—and before that, really, the Walkman—music was mostly a shared and noisy experience. It was live shows. It was singing at church. It was living rooms with family, or parties with friends. Just take a quick look at The Lord of the Rings—everyone is singing about everything.

If you wanted music, you usually got it with other people, or at least in a public space. Someone else heard what you heard.

Now music is curated, private, and perfectly tailored: a personal soundtrack, sealed off from everyone around you. Two people can sit on the same couch and be in entirely different worlds. We are, in the most literal sense, alone together.

And once you notice that, it's hard not to wonder what it does to us—especially as Christians.

Consider the implications for worship.

Many of us have been trained for years to experience music as an individualized product. We choose the genre. We choose the mood. We skip what we don't like. We find the voice we prefer. We don't have to adjust. We don't have to wait. We don't have to submit our tastes to anyone else's. The "beautiful" song is the one that fits me.

And yet there's a reason people still crave live shows and live recordings. Something is different when you're part of a crowd—when the sound isn't perfect, when you can't control the setlist, when you're swept into something bigger than your own preferences. But even that longing can now be flattened into a solo experience: put on a VR headset and "attend" a concert by yourself.

Corporate worship is designed differently. It isn't meant to be a private listening experience. It isn't meant to be optimized for my preferences. The gathered church sings together—different ages, different backgrounds, different musical tastes, different levels of skill—and the point isn't that everyone gets their ideal soundtrack. The point is that we become one voice, one body, offering one confession of faith.

So why is it that many of us feel more engaged singing alone than with others?

Part of it is simply that we've been trained. We've been discipled by design. We've been shaped by a world where beauty is personalized, and where the highest good is choice, convenience, and control. Then we carry those instincts—without even realizing it—into the church.

In other words, design doesn't just shape what we do. It shapes what we love. It shapes what we expect. It shapes what we assume is "good," what we assume is "beautiful," and what we assume is "normal."

And that's why my son's line keeps echoing in my head:

Here we are alone together.

Because it captures something true about our moment—and it raises a question worth sitting with:

What would it look like for the church to recover a beauty that requires one another?